Make those moments less frequent and more significant, perhaps. As I remember it in Witcher 3, when you get within a certain distance of a group of bandits they immediately start to attack you, and you can either run or kill them. Then you carry on doing whatever you were doing before.
What if there was more of a stand off first, or some sense that they were sizing you up? Maybe sometimes they call some mates over and you're badly outnumbered? Or maybe there's a child among them who'll be left alone without these guys? Or it's just really tough to kill a group of 3 bandits like that and you have to figure out whether it's worth the trouble? Or if you start losing fights to these guys you don't die but begin to lose reputation and aren't taken seriously elsewhere? Or it's not immediately clear who they are and whether they are wanted murderers or just a bunch of travellers? Or maybe you can choose to buy some stolen goods from them instead of fight them? Or maybe there's some ambiguity established in the narrative about how bad some of these groups really are?
I dunno, just making it up as I go along. Plus it's all more work, obviously, and in some cases might require more advanced AI than is currently easy to implement. But all these things could make you stop and think about what you were doing and would be more in tune with a the detailed worldbuilding elsewhere in the game.

No, it doesn't force you. But the point is really about how inconsequential it feels if you do fight these groups.
As for the alternative, well that's the whole question here, isn't it? I don't know that there's an ideal solution, just different strategies to mitigate the disconnect.

I'd agree that in TLOU they came up with a story that matched the game. But that basically meant that every scenario they wrote had to end up with Joel killing everyone, and often it just didn't make sense. The only thing I could take from it in the end was that Joel really liked killing everyone.
I think it is an issue with Geralt. All those times you find a group of 'bad' people and just chop them down felt faintly ridiculous. There's always some leeway with a fantasy setting because it doesn't have to follow any realworld example, but the random human encounters were always too throwaway for my liking.
Edit: And the more detail you put into your story and world building, the more that kind of stuff stands out.

I remember liking Dawn of Sorrow quite a lot (except the stupid touchscreen stuff) and would agree that it's a more tightly designed game than SotN. But what I love about SotN is that it is such a mess. It doesn't seem fussed about the order you do things, or whether everything's evenly spaced. It just chucks everything in there and lets you discover it, or not. I like that the upside down castle is completely open, and yet there's clearly an optimal route in terms of the difficulty of bosses. It's happy to let you wander and just uncover the map and see what you find. It should'nt really work but it does (for me), and is what makes it unique among Metroidvanias. So many others are more polished and more sensibly structured, but SotN will always stand out as its own thing.

How many people are you likely to end up killing in the course of the game though? I mean, even the baddest of bad men didn't kill hundreds, yet I imagine in something as large as RDR2 that would be the case.
To really make it work you somehow have to reduce the instances of violence, but somehow still fill the game with stuff to do. But then the easiest thing to simulate between human characters in games seems to be having them shoot or beat each other. Most other things require specific situational contexts (e.g. hacking) or more complex forms of interaction that are hard to make work (e.g. stealth).
Not really sure where I'm going with this. But it's interesting to see how different games try to deal with the issue even if there's no ideal solution.

Even post-apocalyptic isn't necessarily enough of an excuse. The Last of Us didn't work for me, for example, because it still felt too violent even for its setting. Everyone was acting like it was The Road, when in fact it wasn't quite as hopeless as that. If it was just Joel being a psycho it might have worked to an extent, but people were eating each other and shit when there were still animals running about and plants growing, apparently still edible. Felt like the narrative could never escape having to fit round a violent action game.
Perhaps comedy/satire is the only option. Or creating an action game that revolves around actions other than killing. Yakuza might be very silly, but there's a certain consistency to it because you're mostly just beating folks up rather than murdering them.

I haven't been playing this much but still go back from time to time. Just did my first complete run on Journey on Normal. Crap score of course, just under 3000 in the rankings. But what an amazing experience. Love it.

Invisible Inc is most played for me as 216 hours. XCom 2 just behind (206), then Drive Club (196).
XCom 2 is cheating though. Half that time was spent waiting 10 minutes for levels to load or watching cut scenes repeat themselves.

Coins in Mario 64. Just because 100 = an extra star. Makes it worth really exploring each level and experimenting with different techniques for getting about.
Also, seconded on the Celeste strawberries. And I don't even like strawberries.

He's had some bitterness towards CEX for probably about 15 years now. I assume he worked there for a bit but they couldn't appreciate his vision, or something.
To hold on to the grudge for that long and still see it as a major life event all these years later suggests some pretty major issues with the guy. He's cleary not all there, and I kind of just feel sorry for him now.